The 100 Greatest Americans

[Mysterious F.]

Remember how, not too long ago, I said that I'd try to make a list of the 100 greatest Americans? Well, I went and did it.

One hundred isn't a very high number in the grand scheme of things, so I ended up having to exclude several great people. A few worth mentioning include Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Banneker, Nellie Bly, Louis Brandeis, Richard E. Byrd, Ray Charles, Frederic Edwin Church, Harvey Williams Cushing, Miles Davis, Lee De Forest, William Faulkner, Stephen Foster, Geronimo, Martha Graham, D. W. Griffith, John Hancock, Cordell Hull, John Jay, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert E. Lee, Douglas MacArthur, Cyrus McCormick, Rosa Parks, John J. Pershing, David Sarnoff, Walt Whitman, and Oprah Winfrey.

The only real qualification was that you felt more American than Stanley Kubrick, an American-born director who made nearly all of his most lasting accomplishments after leaving the nation. I disqualified Thomas Paine and James D. Watson, among a few others, for this reason. I also didn't count people like William Penn who have very important places in American history but came before independence.

Compare mine to this terrible poll. I mean, Mel Gibson? Dr. Phil? George W. Bush? Tom Cruise? Barack Obama before he actually did anything important? HUGH HUFNER?! Too many of these people are also just celebrities that are going to fade into obscurity in the far future. Only 33 people on their list made it to mine.

So without further ado...

1. John Adams
2. John Quincy Adams
3. Jane Addams
4. Muhammad Ali
5. Susan B. Anthony
6. Louis Armstrong
7. Neil Armstrong
8. John Bardeen
9. Clara Barton
10. Alexander Graham Bell
11. Irving Berlin
12. Nellie Bly
13. Norman Borlaug
14. Louis Brandeis
15. William J. Brennan, Jr.
16. Andrew Carnegie
17. Rachel Carson
18. Ray Charles
19. Cesar Chavez
20. Frederick Edwin Church
21. Henry Clay
22. John Dewey
23. Walt Disney
24. Dorothea Dix
25. Frederick Douglass
26. W. E. B. DuBois
27. Amelia Earhart
28. Thomas Alva Edison
29. Dwight D. Eisenhower
30. Duke Ellington
31. Ralph Waldo Emerson
32. Philo Farnsworth
33. F. Scott Fitzgerald
34. Henry Ford
35. John Ford
36. Stephen Foster
37. Benjamin Franklin
38. Robert Fulton
39. William Lloyd Garrison
40. George Gershwin
41. Josiah Williard Gibbs
42. Samuel Gompers
43. Ulysses S. Grant
44. Alexander Hamilton
45. Joseph Henry
46. Jim Henson
47. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
48. Edwin Hubble
49. William James
50. Thomas Jefferson
51. Chief Joseph
52. Helen Keller
53. Charles Lindbergh
54. Martin Luther King, Jr.
55. Meriwether Lewis & William Clark & Sacagawea
56. Abraham Lincoln
57. James Madison
58. Horace Mann
59. George Marshall
60. John Marshall
61. Thurgood Marshall
62. Harvey Milk
63. James Monroe
64. John Muir
65. Rosa Parks
66. Alice Paul
67. Charles Sanders Pierce
68. Edgar Allan Poe
69. John Wesley Powell
70. Elvis Presley
71. Frederick Law Olmstead
72. Jackie Robinson
73. Eleanor Roosevelt
74. Franklin D. Roosevelt
75. Theodore Roosevelt
76. Carl Sagan
77. Jonas Salk
78. Margaret Sanger
79. Sequoyah
80. Sitting Bull
81. Jedediah Smith
82. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
83. John Steinbeck
84. Joseph Story
85. Louis Sullivan
86. Nikola Tesla
87. Henry David Thoreau
88. Harry S. Truman
89. Sojourner Truth
90. Harriet Tubman
91. Mark Twain
92. Earl Warren
93.  Booker T. Washington
94. George Washington
95. Noah Webster
96. Orson Welles
97. Eli Whitney
98. Woodrow Wilson
99. Frank Lloyd Wright
100.   Orville & Wilbur Wright

[Keaton]

That's a pretty good list.  You forgot Chuck Norris, though

[Hi no Seijin]

Why is Edison on the list?  The guy was a complete douchebag.  He stole inventions.  Early filmmakers had to move out to California because Edison had an iron grip on the industry.  He scared people off of alternating current, costing us years of progress in energy infrastructure.  He should be on a list for the 100 Worst Americans.

[Keaton]

This is true.  Practically everything we know and love about Thomas Edison was actually made/discovered by his crack team of researchers, who got essentially zero credit.  So I guess in that respect, he really does embody America.

[Deku]

Great list! You must have put a lot of effort into it. However, I agree with the others in the Edison was an awful awful man. I don't think anyone says it better than an old comic from The Oatmeal all about how awesome Tesla was and how horrible Edison was. I'm too lazy to go looking for it, but give it a read sometime, all the information is correct.

[Mysterious F.]

Edison may not have been the "true" inventor of many of the inventions credited to him, but saying that he stole them is like saying that Elvis stole his music from black people. The other scientists and inventors of Menlo Park all created their devices under his guidance and he was more involved with the creation process than a lot of his detractors give credit.

The real reasons why I included him, however, are that he essentially founded the world's first research laboratory and, most importantly, he was a successful businessman responsible for bringing these inventions to the public and making them popular, which is in many ways just as important as inventing them. Take Samuel Morse; he didn't invent the telegraph so much as he just completed Joseph Henry's research, but he made it a breakthrough in American culture and changed long-distance communication, so I included him for that.

[Keaton]

Edison may not have been the "true" inventor of many of the inventions credited to him, but saying that he stole them is like saying that Elvis stole his music from black people. The other scientists and inventors of Menlo Park all created their devices under his guidance and he was more involved with the creation process than a lot of his detractors give credit.

The real reasons why I included him, however, are that he essentially founded the world's first research laboratory and, most importantly, he was a successful businessman responsible for bringing these inventions to the public and making them popular, which is in many ways just as important as inventing them. Take Samuel Morse; he didn't invent the telegraph so much as he just completed Joseph Henry's research, but he made it a breakthrough in American culture and changed long-distance communication, so I included him for that.

Fair enough.

[Mysterious F.]

So, in my quest to be as perfect as possible, I updated the list and made a few replacements. These are gone:

Samuel Adams
Johnny Appleseed
Daniel Boone
Bill Gates
Patrick Henry
Steve Jobs
John F. Kennedy
Samuel Morse
John D. Rockefeller
Norman Rockwell
Dr. Seuss
Tennessee Williams

And these are added:

Muhammad Ali
Norman Borlaug
Nellie Bly
Louis Brandeis
Ray Charles
Frederick Edwin Church
John Ford
Stephen Foster
James Monroe
Rosa Parks
Jackie Robinson
Joseph Story

Yep. 

[xarlote]

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[xarlote]

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[xarlote]

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[xarlote]

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[xarlote]

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